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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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In one sense it is no
more valid to look for "Lutheran art" than it is for Baptist
horticulture, Catholic astronomy, or Methodist economics. If the impulse to
pursue Lutheran context for the arts is born of either confessional chauvinism or
denominational envy—the Catholics have something, why can't we?—then it would
be better to let it pass along with other irrelevant tinglings of toes or
itchings of palms. There are, however, better reasons to inquire about how and
when and whether the Lutheran movement gives encouragement to human creativity
in the form of various arts.

One good reason to
explore the connections has to do with patronage. Historians of art regularly
cite the general disappearance of the church as inspirer or subsidizer of
creativity. No longer, now that Christendom has gone, will the Christian church
be able to control or direct resources which will attract sculptors, painters,
or engravers. Gawkers at the great art in European churches can only with
difficulty imagine a day when wealthy classes were made up of people who sought
salvation beyond the world of tax shelters and super-bowl victories, when they
put their money into betting on a kingdom to come. Art as indulgence. No longer
doesthe Christian symbol system
serve to connect the loose ends of a culture, or to unite the imaginations of
diverse sorts of people in any place and time. Today each artist must face the
terror that is born where beauty erupts and fight the terror of loneliness: how
can I succeedin generating a system of symbols potent enough that I can
lure people inside it long enough to confront my artifact and art?

Lacking the church as
agent or sponsor, artists only rarely resort to Christian themes and only
slightly less rarely do they give expression to overtly religious in­spirations
of the sort Paul Tillich used to celebrate in, say, the numinous works of
Vincent van Gogh. A church leadership that would divorce Christ from culture
then complains that Christ and culture are divorced. Chris­tians should not
involve themselves with the arts, litera­ture, economics, politics, human
affairs, they say—and then they bemoan the fact that culture is secular. Peter
Berger once complained that when Christians thus complain about secularism they
are as foolish as blond parents would be if they faulted their daughter for
being blond: you produced her, their hearers can say.

Here and there the
churches have won back some space and created, at least in the Christian
community, a congenial climate for the arts. There is a large enough critical
mass of creative energy and people to appreciate it in the Lutheran colleges
and universities of the great­er Midwest that some sort of tradition has been
born: of galleries, choirs, musical compositions, and artistry. When the post-World
War II building boom in the churches gave suburban Christianity a chance to ex­press
itself, Lutheranism was often congratulated for being free enough within its
traditional outlook to be rather bold in architectural creation. While many a
sanctuary has seen sorry banners, some have also wel­comed sewn works of
liturgical integrity. This is not the moment to inventory, but only to point
out that the landscape has not been completely barren, the sound-scape entirely
bleak. There has been something, not nothing, to inspire inquiries like this
one about the Lutheran genius.

For the future, one must
say that the outposts of Chris­tianity that have had Lutheran presences, from
Norway to Namibia, from Torgau to Tacoma, in Philadelphias and St. Louises and
Minneapolises, are at least large enough to show up on the Christian screen.
There are, we were often enough reminded by the public media in the Luther
year, eight million Americans and seventy million earthlings in all who derive
their prism for the Gospel in some direct way from the Lutheran heritage. If a
few hundred Shakers in nineteenth-century Amer­ica could generate such great
toolcraft and esthetic in­tegrity, then there should be at least islands and
outcroppings where
Lutheranism finds a voice. It may play its part in rendering aspects of the
Body of Christ vivid in chorus, pigment, or literary line.

It takes time, energy,
patience for aborted efforts or lost talents to be transcended, before an
element of the Christian church does find voice. I recall reading an article a
year or so ago by a Fordham priest who was responding to post-Vatican II
nostalgia buffs who rued the bad translations and worse music which have af­flicted
the Church before, during, and after the guitar-accompaniment era. He was
ministering to Catholics who envied Lutherans in the arts of worship because
after twenty years Catholic liturgy lacked a new poetry. Remember, he said,
that Lutheranism's two poets, Mar­tin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach, are
distanced from each other not by two and a half decades but by two and a half
centuries. Enfoldings of church life and struggling efforts by
"poets" between them were all part of the process. Take the long
view.

Typologies of Christ and
Culture

That confessional
traditions in sundry cultural set­tings do engender or acquire specific
modalities for being in the world is obvious to any student of state­craft or
artcraft. The most familiar typology, one that by now can be called classic, is
that of H. Richard Niebuhr in Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1951). As most serious students of the subject know, Niebuhr
discerned a fivefold set of options or located five characteristic approaches.
Three of them have appeared on Lutheran soil, but we need not take them seriously:
Christ against culture, Christ above cul­ture, Christ of culture. Christ against;
certain prophetic movements have been so crabby that they would pose Christ
against the creation—a heresy for anyone who has read the celebrations of
nature and history in Lu­ther's explanations of the Fourth Petition of the
Lord's Prayer or the Large Catechism elaboration on the First Article of the
Creed. Christ above: some Lutheran pie­tists, in the messy bag of mixed
blessings they brought (and there were some blessings in it), sometimes acted
as if everything in the world was so tainted that Christ would be served by
purists. Heresy again, same docu­mentation. Christ of: baptize whatever
you find to your liking in a culture, be it your Volk, nation, "way of
life," or possessions. Lutherans often do that, but they really know they
should not, so let us not take them typologically seriously. We are at this
moment discussing sub­stance, not sin.

That left two options.
The one saw Christ transform­ing culture. The church was always in the process
of seeing sinful, errant, finite domains of humanity being brought ever closer
into some sort of congruence with the Kingdom of God or a
similar ideal. It was this outlook that stood behind many awesome Catholic and
Calvinist impulses in public life. Witness legal Christendom. Witness the
Puritan Protestant achievement in Geneva or Massachusetts Bay, or, if we have
the wit trace the hidden theology behind the Enlightenment in America, we can
even see the suspicious and hence creative U.S. Constitution as a
Presbyterian document. It is realistic about human nature, but still impels
citizens to be constructive.

In such a reading, Luther
and Lutheranism come off less well. In Paul Tillich's terms, for Lutheranism,
the demonic pervades the structures of existence. There is no
"transforming" of culture, though there can be responsibility in it.
The Lutheran record of passivity in public life is born of this vision.
Instead, Luther's own radically dialectical view of Christ and culture "in
paradox" kept it uncreative in affairs of state and the polis.

The historian has a hard
time confuting what Niebuhr sensed: uncreativity. On occasion, however, when I
let the details of Niebuhr's text recede from my mind and I pop up or off with
responses to questions after addresses, I forget that he notices what seems to
me to be my own patent: reverse the fields from statecraft to art and it is the
Lutherans who have more positive views of cultural potential, while the
Calvinists and Reformed in general—the Zwinglians in particular—shrink.

One should not overdo
this twisting and turning to make Lutheranism come out right, if positive
achievement is what is "right." The artistic peer of Bach on
Protestant soil, Rembrandt, and the poetic genius of literature on similar
soil, Milton, were of Reformed, not Lutheran lineage. Yet when the Reformed
think about it, their churches, while not unaesthetic, tend to be unadorned.
Their music has been Protestant versions of plainsong and plainchant and
psalmsong, and the Calvinists have always been a bit embarrassed by eruptions
of toccatas, explosions of color, or the hints of ecstasy that come with
four-star, twenty-one-gun salute eucharists. Karl Earth and Andre Bieler
typically see the sanctuary as an arena for the Word, and that is basically it.
Mozart is heavenly and Swiss architecture is to be appreciated, but they are
not an intrinsic part of leitourgia, the people's service. They may be a
threat to it. Keep the cross bare of Body, if there is to be a cross at all.

That imaging runs close
to stereotyping, but let it pass in outline long enough to make a point:
Niebuhr was there first. In Christ and Culture he specifically observes
that Luther and Lutheranism encouraged education in languages, arts, and history,
especially in music. The Lutheran teaching on vocation
chartered commerce and military life. Niebuhr simply and safely saw these
encouragements as part of the "yes" side of Lutheran dialectic, over against
the "no" which is always especially vivid in, say, political life.

This "yes" does
not mean that Christ transforms culture into some new consolidation called
Christendom or, more embarrassingly for lovers of the Gospel, Lutherandom. It
does mean that in the midst of a sad and fallen world, where all things human
and finite live under the marks of Adam and Cain and Herod, there is room for
astonishingly brilliant, refreshingly free celebration of nature and history.

I hope a possibly
mischosen illustration will not lead some to let me lose my point. I have often
noticed in the two sides of American watercolorist Charles Burchfield's work
this Lutheran dialectic. Was this because Burchfield "happened to be a
Lutheran," or was it accidental, or was it integral to his faith and
vision? On the onehand, he painted extremely realistic and depressingly
more-than-accurate pictures of Buffalo and Ohio cityscapes, the
grey-turned-black homes of workers in 1 industrial districts. On the other
hand, there were those scenes from nature, in which penumbras of the sacral
could not be suppressed; they created auras to halo tree and brook and sun.

Revisiting Primal
Lutheran Resources

When one seeks to
cultivate a Lutheran context for arts of all sorts, it is necessary to revisit
the primal Lutheran resources which have to do with creativity. In a previous Cresset
article on Luther and the Humanities (December, 1981, p. 11), I cited some
Luther lines so apt and searing, so penetrating and useful, that no doubt all
readers have kept them at hand on desktop or had them engraved for doorposts,
enscrolled for frontdoors. From that rich harvest, these few lines:

We [in the Reformation]
are now living in the dawn of the future life; for we are beginning to regain a
knowledge of the creation, a knowledge we had forfeited by the fall of Adam. .
. Erasmus does not concern himself with this; it interests him little how the
fetus is made, formed, and developed in the womb. Thus he also fails to prize
the excellency of the state of marriage. [God's power] is evident even in a
peach stone. No matter how hard its shell, in due season it is forced open by a
very soft kernel inside it. All this is ignored by Erasmus. He looks at the
creatures as a cow stares at a new gate.

Such a view of nature was
grounded in a specific way of seeing creation. Most people in the Lutheran
tradition assent to the notion of creatio ex nihilo; that God created
out of nothing. This, Jurgen Moltmann tells us, is a handy doctrine of creation
because of the fact or insofar as it helps protect our understanding of the
freedom and spontaneity of God. They might be more surprised to know that it is
not a specifically biblical teaching. Not until the Apocrypha, in a line or two
of something Maccabean, or until well into Christian patriarchy, in the
writings of Theophilus of Antioch (I stole that obscure reference from Jaroslav
Pelikan) did "creation out of nothing" find explicit statement.

Instead, as any reader of
the Large Catechism on the First Article makes clear, it is creatio continua
that dom­inated in the engendering generation of Lutheranism, before the
scholastics got neat about things. Luther, who as roving planet and not fixed
star, as he put it, lived out in advance Nietzsche's line that "one must
still have chaos in one's soul to give birth to a dancing star," cele­brated
that view of creation in which God is always in the process of rendering cosmos
out of chaos. Instantly that profession about divine Creatorhood is focused in
the creativity of the person, the "young child, 'My boy,'" who can
answer as a leader of adults:

I hold and believe that I
am a creature of God; that is. that he has given and constantly sustains my
body, soul, and life, my members great and small, all the faculties of my mind,
my reason and under­standing, and so forth; . . . Besides, he makes all
creation help pro­vide the comforts and necessities of life. . . . Moreover, he
gives all physical and temporal blessings—good government, peace, secur­ity.
...

And, in turn, "we
are in duty bound to love, praise, and thank God without ceasing, and, in
short, to devote all these things to his service. . . ."

The implications of such
a view for the artist in his or her vocation of creating and the constituent or
client or congregant in participating should be obvious. Christ, the Incarnate
One, who our race hath honored thus that he deigns to dwell with us, is always
in the process of transforming that very culture in which the demonic at the
same time (simul, again and always) remains per­vasive inside history.

Lutheranism, then,
becomes a life of response. This may take the form of prayer and praise, as
Luther said it must when he dedicated the first "Lutheran" sanc­tuary
in Torgau Castle. It may take the form of home-making, teaching, being a politician.
It can never rule out the artist, the glorifier of singular things.

To be a Lutheran and to
be a dull, practical burgher is quite natural. Yes, natural, as in Natural Man
or Woman. To be a Lutheran and be tone deaf, not gifted in putting together pigment
and stone, not nuanced about pentameter or sprung rhythm, is allowable. There
are a variety of gifts but the same spirit. But to belong to the tradition
which speaks as Luther did of music or as did his Large Catechism of creation
and then to oppose artistic creation—that moves beyond the bounds of
permissible understandings. We may not all be called to frequent the galleries,
buy sandwiches for the com­posers, or get the poets out of their garrets. We
are all called, in this tradition, somehow to respond to Creation by
encouraging the creators among us, the creativity within us.

Martin E. Marty is the
Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the history of modern
Christianity at The University of Chicago and Associate Editor of the Christian
Century. A Lutheran minister whose major energies have gone into the
teaching and writing of history or into cultural comment and, in his words,
"barely more than impotent “social activism,'" he has carried on a
career-long love affair with the arts and is an honorary member of or fellow in
a number of Christianity-and-Arts foundations and fellowships. This article
parallels remarks at a noontime lecture he gave during the 1983 "Worship
and Witness" festival in Minneapolis. Lutheran Brotherhood sponsored the
lecture. As a luncheon address, he explains, it remains deliciously unburdened
by footnotes.